Show HN: Meatshields – An in-browser turn-based strategy game | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Meatshields – An in-browser turn-based strategy game

113 pointsBaron_Von_Meats36 comments

A few months ago (82 days to be exact!) I posted a link on HN to my game, Meatshields. A bunch of you commented and played my game and gave me some wonderful feedback. Over the last few months I've been playing with many of you and implementing the best of everybody's suggestions.

So, thank you, HN for all your help! I feel this is an extreme overhaul I couldn't have done without your input.

Since then, I have: Dramatically improved our hosting platform (So it HOPEFULLY won't go down this time (oops.)), Added two new units, Rebalanced all existing units, Added many more maps, Improved the AI's threat-weighing algorithm, Completely redid the tutorial system, Added some real basic (and I mean BASIC) "animations", Redid the in-game UI (several times), And most importantly, HUNDREDS OF BUG FIXES.

For everybody who didn't see the original thread, Meatshields is a free, online, turn-based strategy game I made that is heavily inspired by Advance Wars. Those games took a very long time to complete in-person so I wanted to build a similar game online where players had many games going on at the same time and would log on once or twice a day to take their turns.

If anybody has any suggestions or bugs they encounter, please feel free to post them here. Otherwise, I hope everybody likes the game, and thanks again for the help!

https://meatshields.com/

One piece of feedback, make it easier to try the game before investing in a login/registration process.

I will not register to try a game. It's too much friction. I will register to continue playing a game I like.

You've hidden the 'Try Meatshields' link in tiny text below the fold -- present me with a demo experience front and center, and consider pushing the FAQ content below that. Make playing the game the hero of your website.

Yeah, I actually completely agree. While it's not something I prioritized during development, perhaps it should be something I prioritize now. I tried to minimize the friction by not requiring any email verification but I realize that's something that's a deterrent to some players.

The ultracheap way to do this is just have a 2min gameplay video where you describe how a turn works.

I think a quick gameplay video is a great idea.

For something like a strategy game, it's nice to see if the game even appeals to you at all before you invest in a tutorial.

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As someone said upstream, as a content-creator, I feel like I should just try the game someone spent many hours of their life building. But as a content-consumer, I'm irrational with my attention span for some reason.

What about some login with Google/Facebook/etc? Might be a bit less friction, I know I would prefer it.

So because my game is hosted on Heroku, there are some banned IPs that facebook has blacklisted that Heroku uses. I did give it a shot earlier in development but perhaps I can get it working with google login! :)

I'm aware of the proxy services that heroku provides but it wound up being a lot of setup for something that I could probably replace with something like google logins if I wanted. Sounds like people would like it!

Yes! I have been looking for a strategy game to try... and signing up was still too much friction for me.

As a content-maker, I would feel that attitude is incredible unreasonable, it's "only a sign up." As a content-consumer, that's just where I am.

Same here, not going to invest the time and create an account unless I have a good idea that the result is going to be worth it.

The Try link goes to the same place as the Create Account link.

Three pieces of feedback:

1. The tutorial is really long. It would be better if it was broken up by campaigns that use what you've learned so far. I just got to the fire mage section, and am starting to lose interest.

2. This really drove home how much sound matters. Even just some background music and simple attack sound effects would go a long way to make the game more immersive.

3. The other player's turn happens so fast that I don't get a sense of what happened on it.

Yeah, I tried to shrink the tutorial as much as I could to just be the core gameplay elements. Nothing fancy. When I was first showing the game to people they would have a really hard time knowing what to do in a real game so I figured this was better than being totally confused when they do play :(

Sound definitely matters in the gaming experience, a part of me is torn because I hate websites that make noise when I didn't ask them to, but I suppose this is a game so people can expect it, and maybe I can have it off by default?

With the way the game is set-up currently, you only get the end result of a user's turn. One day I do hope to have a turn history or previous-turn display though.

Maybe have a pop up that asks if you want sound on or off?

I would disagree. I found the tutorial to be a great length. It showed you game mechanics and basic tactics all wrapped up in something that felt a little like playing a real game.

The only thing I found was missing was some explanation of the 'Does strong damage against' vs weak damage. Possibly there just needs to be a matrix that can be referred to.

My critique.... You can look me up as kefka in your system as well. I had a chance to play quite a bit over the weekend :D

1. The tutorial could use significant tightening up. compact it to 1/4 of the text/messages/popups. Think of this as a grind, get them through fast to start playing.

2. Allow undoing moves until the "End Turn" is done. More than a few times, I mis-clicked move on the same square a piece was, and effectively did a NO-OP. Even if it was a global-undo that reset the turn's condition would be better than nothing.

3. For early-mid game, mages seem vastly overpowered. I was expecting a rock-paper-scissors mechanic but Mages seem to blast anything under Centaur away... Even the knight hiding in the mountains gets slaughtered.

4. Let me hit my own units. Sometimes when a pile-on is going on, I want to off my 3hp horse to move in a Giant.

5. Too many catapult types. There is a difference between them, but not really. Perhaps the Fire-catapult could be a area-of-effect fire bomb, including hitting your own units?

6. Sound would be nice, but lower priority than these.

I get "ERROR: Invalid email address submitted" with emails of the form:

myemail+meatshields@gmail.com

The plus sign in gmail allows me to know who sent the email (or who my email was distributed by): https://gmail.googleblog.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-mo...

Funny enough -- while fixing this, I found out that you can just sign up without an email and then immediately go to your profile page and add your email with less strict validation. Whoops. Well go ahead and use this as a workaround for now!

Way too many instructions to get to play the game.

I had to click like 100 times to just get through the mandatory tutorial, and I had to enter a User Name and Display Name and come on -- simplify this stuff. Not fun.

If your user interface isn't simple enough to use without instructions, then you are building your user interface wrong.

The game mentions that it can be played on a phone but i find it rather poorly adapted (not at all really) to a phone screen - tested on Mobile Safari. The game does look interesting! Please make it more pleasant to play on mobile.

Yes, that's a totally valid suggestion. So far the best I've done is make the buttons significantly more usable on mobile. I would love to create a mobile-only layout or an app. I realize this a very important request for a lot of players so I will try to get something working for that soon.

I spent about 15 minutes going through the tutorial before getting bored and trying to find a real game, only to find I have to finish the tutorial. I get that there's a lot to explain but man that tutorial is long.

A way to solve this problem would rather than explaining everything up front add a campaign whereby you first play games against AI with only the basics unlocked, then as you advance explain what the newly unlocked thing is.

The main problem here is that you have a new match for each new feature, but walk through it step by step with tutorial messages. Just having one message at the start of each tutorial message "this is unicorn, unicorn does X" and then let the player figure it out would go a long way IMO.

Interesting game. I have been looking for a web-based turn based strategy game for a while, this looks promising. Some thoughts:

1. Let the user press Enter or Space to go to the next dialog in the tutorial.

2. Let the user press Escape or another character to exit out of the current "move/attack" selection state.

3. Let the user undo/go back to the start of the turn if the user hasn't pressed "end turn" yet. Very often I click move on the player's own square or move instead of attack/capture or other similar mistakes.

4. The graphics are fine for me, but I just feel the UX in terms of actual gameplay is very unintuitive/more complicated than it could be. Maybe get a game designer to give you some feedback?

This is a meta thought, generally these are submitted as a link and then context is provided in a comment. Not sure that that's a better way of doing it though. Might generate more visits.

Oh, whoops! I had figured Show HN was more about the discussion but that's a great suggestion, since people can come comment on it anyways. Thanks for the tip!

For the discussion part, you can just write a comment in the thread itself. That what the show bit is the thing you want to show and the things you want to say go in the thread.

I think I recognize some of these sprites... Borrowed them from Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup by any chance? If so you should mention it somewhere IMO. I like the game's concept, always been a fan of Advance Wars! As a suggestion, I'd add some form of sound feedback like some others have already mentioned.

I saw the option to play against the AI. Have you considered letting players write their own AI?

I love that idea! I've had a couple friends express interest, although I'm not sure I'm talented enough to set up a system for player-submitted AI. If the game doesn't work out, though, that's a really wonderful next-project idea :D

You could implement player-submitted AI as a web API - so they would write something in whatever language they choose, deploy it on Heroku, or now.sh, or stdlib or whatever, and then provide the URL.

When it's time to make a move, you just call their URL and process the response.

I don't think games involve a lot of data right? So you could probably make it stateless by transferring the whole game each time.

If you want a hand with this I could probably help! Just reply here, and I'll drop you an email.

Huh. I hadn't even thought of players hosting their own AI! That would actually be EXTREMELY easy to implement on my end, haha. You are correct, and that's basically what the game is doing already just to my own AI server, so all I would have to do is use a pugged-in url, perform a POST call and then parse the response. What a good idea!

So I guess my to-do list now is: 1) Forgot password feature 2) B.Y.O.A.I. :)

Awesome. I'm unaffiliated with stdlib, but I think you basically can't get easier than that for hosting something like this for free. And you can probably put together a template for people really easily.

Anyway, sounds like you don't need any help - good luck!

One option for this is to make the split clear between the backend and the view.

If your frontend is asking for the current game state (to render it) and sending control messages to modify it, then you don't need much else to allow people to write bots. All you really need to do then is make sure there's a way they can access the exact same API your frontend uses but with (e.g.) an API key rather than cookies.

It's a reasonable thing to do for the code anyway (and might be how it works now, I don't know). Bots then have the ability and knowledge of any human player, you don't need to run any code your side (which brings up issues with sandboxing) and people can write in whatever language they want.

Yeah that is basically how it works now, and I think I'm gonna do it! (Discussed a little bit in another comment on this thread.) Player's would have to host their own AI but it'd be as simple as sending over the exact same game data that the browser receives and asking for/parsing a response.

What's tricky that I forgot to mention in the other comment is that more information is acquired as moves uncover fog-of-war tiles. So I've been sending a new request every unit-move, rather than once per player-turn. This is fine as the data being exchanged is so small and fast, but just something people might need to account for. I suppose I can also quickly whip up a system to grab all sequential moves from an AI service when fog of war is disabled and save some network traffic.

You should probably implement a forgot password feature. Other than that it looks good!

Thank you! Yeah it'd have to be only for people who have submitted their email but that's still better than nothing. Guess I know what I'm adding next!

The artwork could do with some upgrades.

If you have the budget for it, consider hiring a professional artist.

Haha, and even that is putting it lightly ;)

I've had some friends volunteer to help but they never seem to pan out so perhaps it's time I got a professional :)

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